The declaration of war was a quiet thing. It was not a shout in the darkness, but a shared, resolute silence in the heart of Silas's humming workshop. The weight of Liam's revelation had settled, and the initial shock had begun to crystallize into a cold, hard purpose. They had a target. Now, they had to build a weapon capable of striking it.
The atmosphere in the cavern transformed instantly. The manic, intellectual curiosity of the previous days was replaced by the focused, frantic energy of a war room. Silas, completely in his element, was a whirlwind of motion. He abandoned all pretense of grumpiness, now fully consumed by the greatest engineering challenge of his life: planning an assault on a fortress that weaponized reality itself.
"The vision is not enough!" he barked, grabbing a piece of chalk and beginning to sketch furiously on his massive slate blackboard. "It is a map of a ghost. We need tools to fight that ghost." His hands moved with a life of their own, drawing complex schematics that blended arcane runes with principles of electrical engineering. "The Redactor's primary weapon against you, Seeker, and by extension, all Sealbearers, is mnemonic erosion. He makes you forget. To fight him, you must be incapable of forgetting."
He drew a diagram of a small, intricate device designed to be worn on the temple. "Personal Temporal Anchors," he announced. "These will not shield you from his power. A shield would be a foolish, brittle thing. No, this is an anchor. It will be attuned to each of you, to the unique frequency of your own history. When the Redactor's field hits you, this device will broadcast the core of your own past—your name, your purpose, your most defining memories—directly back into your consciousness. It will be a constant, screaming reminder of who you are in the face of his enforced silence. It will be agonizing, but it will keep you sane."
While Silas worked, Zara had claimed a large workbench, clearing it of clutter and laying out Liam's hand-drawn, fragmented map of the Silent Oratorium. She was the pragmatist, the strategist, trying to translate Liam's psychic, often metaphorical, visions into a concrete tactical plan.
"This corridor," she said, tapping a section of the map. "You said it 'sings with forgotten hymns'. What does that mean in practical terms, Liam? Is it a sonic defense? A psychic ward?"
Liam, still pale and leaning heavily on the table, closed his eyes, trying to recall the specifics of the vision. Elara's presence in his mind was a cool, steadying influence, helping him organize the chaotic flood of information. *It is not a defense,* Elara projected into his thoughts. *It is a remnant. The faith of the monks who lived there was so strong that it permanently scarred the timeline of the place. The Legion couldn't erase it completely. It is a pocket of 'authentic' history. It will be disorienting to them, but it should be safe for us.*
"It's safe," Liam said, opening his eyes. "Their power is based on imposing a sterile order or a total void. A place with that much… emotional history… it's like a dead zone for their abilities."
"Good," Zara grunted, marking the corridor in green. "A potential safe route." She then pointed to another area. "What about this? The 'Weeping Vault'. You said the walls cry."
"They do," Liam said with a shiver. "It's where they stored artifacts they couldn't erase. The vault itself absorbs the sorrow from the objects' pasts. Anyone who enters is hit with a wave of crippling, absolute despair."
"So, a no-go zone," Ronan concluded from across the room. He wasn't looking at the map. He was hunched over a small, makeshift communication rig, a strange collection of wires and crystals he had cobbled together with Silas's spare parts. He was probing the city's paranormal underworld, casting lines into the shadows to see what he could learn.
"The streets are quiet," Ronan reported, one hand pressed to an old-fashioned earpiece. "Too quiet. My contacts at the Night Market say a lot of low-level Legion enforcers have gone to ground. Vanished. It's like they've all been recalled."
"To the Oratorium," Zara concluded without looking up. "They're fortifying their position. They know a confrontation is coming."
The scale of their task was becoming clearer, and more impossible, with every passing minute. They were four people preparing to assault a fortress garrisoned by a fanatical army, protected by reality-bending defenses, and commanded by a conceptual demigod.
Liam's role in the preparation was the most perilous. He was their only source of intelligence, but every piece of information came at a cost. Several times a day, he would sit before the Harmonizer, not for a deep dive, but for what he called 'surgical strikes'. With Silas guiding the calibration and Elara acting as his shield, he would connect for only a few seconds at a time, aiming for specific, targeted pieces of information.
*The patrol routes of the inner guard.*
The connection was a brief, disorienting flash of marching feet and cold, blank thoughts. Liam pulled back, his head throbbing.
*The specific frequency of the Historical Anchor.*
The connection was a piercing, high-frequency scream of raw power that made his nose bleed.
*A schematic of the Oratorium's power grid.*
The connection was a jolt of pure energy that left his arm numb for an hour.
Each query was a wound, leaving him weaker, more drained. Elara did her best to protect him, absorbing the worst of the psychic backlash, but even she had limits.
*You are pushing yourself too hard, Liam,* her concerned thought echoed in his mind during one of the sessions.
*We need to know more,* he sent back, his own thoughts feeling frayed. *Every detail we miss is a weakness they can exploit.*
*There is a difference between being a scout and being a sacrifice,* she countered gently. *You will be no good to anyone if you are a ghost before we even reach the monastery.*
Her voice of reason, her steadying presence, was the only thing keeping him from dissolving completely. He was learning to trust her not just as an ally, but as a partner.
After a particularly draining session in which Liam managed to confirm the existence of at least fifty Legion soldiers inside the Oratorium, Zara threw her pen down onto the map with a clatter of finality.
"It's not enough," she stated, her voice flat. "It will never be enough."
The others looked at her.
"Silas, your anchors might keep us sane, but they won't stop a bullet," she continued, her gaze hard. "Ronan, your luck can get us through a door, but it can't fight an army. And Liam… you are our key, but if you burn out before we even get to the lock, this is all for nothing. I've run the tactical simulations in my head a hundred times. The outcome is always the same. We breach the outer defenses, we get through the first few levels, and we are overwhelmed by sheer numbers long before we ever reach the Redactor."
A grim silence filled the workshop. She was right. Their courage, their unique abilities, their righteous cause—none of it changed the fundamental, brutal arithmetic of the situation.
"So what are you saying?" Ronan asked quietly. "That we give up?"
"I am saying," Zara replied, her eyes meeting each of theirs in turn, "that our current resources are insufficient. I am saying we need more guns. We need more bodies. We need an army."
"And where do you suggest we find one?" Silas grumbled from his workbench. "The Pact won't sanction this. Borin made that clear. It's too politically dangerous."
The unthinkable idea hung in the air before anyone dared to voice it. They were fighting a war on two fronts. One of their enemies wanted to erase them. The other wanted to contain them. But they had a shared enemy in the Legion, an enemy whose ultimate goal would render both of their philosophies moot.
It was Ronan who finally said it, a tone of disbelief in his own words. "You can't be serious, Zara. You don't mean… them."
"They have a trained, disciplined, and well-equipped fighting force," Zara said, her voice devoid of emotion as she laid out the cold logic. "They have their own conceptual powers that are uniquely suited to fighting a creature of chaos. And most importantly, we now have something they want: definitive proof that the Legion threatens their existence as much as it threatens ours."
"They will never agree," Liam said, shaking his head. "Albright sees us as anomalies to be locked away. Her Restorers tried to kill us."
"And we humiliated them," Zara countered. "We bypassed their security, stole one of their prized possessions, and then used a ghost to shatter the sterile order of their little island prison. They are proud. They will be furious. But Director Albright is not a fool. She is a zealot, but she is a pragmatic zealot. Faced with the choice between a temporary alliance with a lesser evil—us—and allowing a greater evil—the Legion—to potentially destroy everything she has built, which do you think she will choose?"
The logic was sound, but the idea was repellent. To ask for help from the cold, clinical zealots of the Society felt like a betrayal of everything they stood for.
"Even if we wanted to," Liam argued, "how would we even contact her? Walk up to the front door and knock?"
Zara allowed herself a small, grim smile. She walked over to her pack and pulled out a small, ornate silver locket—one of the hundreds of phylacteries she had discreetly pocketed during the chaos in the sanatorium.
"Before we left," she explained, "I took a souvenir. According to the Curator's own catalogue, this phylactery contains the echo of a founding member of the Society of Antiquarian Pursuits." She held it up. "I can't talk to him like you can, Liam. But I'm willing to bet that Albright has a way of knowing when one of her precious founding fathers is taken off-campus."
She placed the locket on the table. "This is our signal flare. Our invitation. We activate it, and she will know where we are. It's the most dangerous gamble we've taken yet. But it's also our only move."
The decision lay before them, heavy and absolute. To proceed alone meant certain failure. To ask for help meant forging a truce with an enemy, a deal with the devil that could very well see them betrayed and destroyed.
Liam looked at the locket, then at the faces of his friends. He saw the same grim understanding in their eyes. They were out of options.
"Do it," Liam said.